Genocide is defined as the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, religious, political, or ethnic group. The word, from the Greek genos, meaning “race,” “nation,” or “tribe,” and the Latin cide, meaning “killing,” originated from the tragic events in the Middle East during the end of the Ottoman empire from 1910 to 1933, which called for a legal concept to describe the deliberate destruction of large groups.

Holocaust is defined as the deliberate and systematic destruction by fire of a racial, religious, political, or ethnic group. The word derives from the Greek holos, meaning “whole” and kaustos, meaning “burnt”.

From 1843 to 1945, the Turks, Kurds, Arabs and Persians committed genocides against the Assyrian nation and other Christian peoples in Asia Minor [Middle East]. These international
human rights violations were crimes against humanity and served as
examples for future atrocities of this manner against the Jewish people in Europe. In these genocides, 750,000 indigenous Christian Assyrians living in their ancestral homelands (known today as the republics of Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran), including 1½ million Christian Armenians and 300,000 Hellenes were burned, slaughtered, and shot systematically. Defenseless men, women, children, and the elderly became victims of these genocides.